This last placement brought me uncomfortably close toMerulo. For a moment I stood there, wondering at how he managed to breathe so angrily.
“I’m not lying to you. Really.” I sat on the bed beside him. “I mean, if you’re asking whether Ihavelied, then yes, there is a possibility—”
“Cameron—”
“—I don’tactuallyfind your lectures on astronomy intuitive, and I’m sorry about that—”
“Cameron.”
“But I’m not lying about . . . whatever it is you think I am. Honestly, this is just confusing.” I flopped down with a sigh, bouncing the bed with enough force to throw Merulo into the air. He let out a strangled yell.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. The sorcerer’s brief journey toward the ceiling had thrown his hair into his face, and now he sat up, glowering at me. “It’s just—can we enjoy this brief window where nothing terrible is happening? Please?”
“I am impairing your enjoyment.”
“Yes!” I said, grateful to have broken through to him. “Yes, you are.”
“You don’t want Hydna.”
“No.” I paused. “Or rather, as a friend. But she’s not who I want.”
Merulo muttered something dark under his breath. I couldn’t quite make out the words, so decided to hazard a guess. “Your stamina is fine,” I repeated, and patted his back reassuringly.
And that seemed to settle it, for shortly thereafter I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 37
In Which Glenda Is Happy to Be Making Progress, and Happy to Be Spending Time in a Cushioned Carriage, but In Which All Attempts at Conversation Have Left Her with the Curious and Unpleasant Suspicion that She Is Being Judged and Found Wanting.
They followed the glow of the sword like a compass.
Glenda brought up portals again, delicately, but the mongrel witch waved her into silence. “I am not the sorcerer. Cutting through space is an act either of arrogance or desperation, and we have the luxury of time. We fly, or we ride.”
As it turned out, they didn’t need to ride for long. The blade pulsed brighter as the carriage hurtled down an ancient tar road, bouncing with every pothole. Glenda swung the sword back and forth, struggling to discern which direction generated the stronger glow as they circled the outskirts of what had once been the sorcerer’s territory. Houses soon dotted the roadside in greater frequency, until they rolled into a small town.
“I know this place.” Glenda leaned from the carriage, Passionweed allowing for a full heart-pounding excitement.“The sorcerer used this village to replenish his supplies. We found it after Cameron started a . . .conflictwith our knights. Surely even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to return.”
The glow led them through the town, past hastily reined in unicorns and gawking children, then out the other end. Its luminescence peaked, drenching the carriage interior in white light, as a military outpost came into sight.
“He can’t have been captured again.” Glenda cloaked her unease with a laugh. This was her prey, and her hunt.
The carriage rolled to a gentle stop. Its doors opened of their own accord, accompanied by the fall of wooden stairs. Gathering her flower-embroidered dress in one hand, and the sword in the other, the mongrel witch descended with a grace that made her bulky form look weightless. In contrast, Glenda hunched down the wooden steps with caution, fearing they might demonstrate animalistic life by twitching or rolling beneath her. Nothing of the sort happened, but she maintained her distrust of the vehicle.
Hurrying to catch up with the witch, Glenda discovered a new discomfort; with Domitia’s blue skin and braided silver hair, the knights would think she was an elf. And elves shouldn’t look like that, all round of face and belly. Certainly, an elf woman would never grow to such a height.
It occupied her, how best to slip into their introductions that she, not this corpulent witch, best represented her kind—and so Glenda was as stunned as the knights sitting inside when the outpost door tore off its hinges, flung by a terrible power.
The mongrel witch held the blade outstretched, its burning light impossible to look at directly. She pointed it atthe slack-jawed men, one by one. When she reached the last man, a bearded fellow who Glenda found faintly familiar, the sword erupted like a sun in miniature—then just as quickly went out. The man had enough time to spit a curse before a spell propelled him upward, slamming him into the outpost ceiling. With his outspread limbs, he looked like an oversized fly in a web. The other men cried out, grabbing for their swords, but the witch fixed them with a deadly look.
“Get out,” Domitia said, and they did, giving the woman a wide berth as they fled through the ruined door. With Glenda at her side, the mongrel witch stood beneath the suspended man. “Sir Cameron, I presume?”
The elf peered upward. “No. But I remember him. The conflict I mentioned before—this is one of the knights who reported it.”
“That’s right!” said the knight, saliva escaping from his mouth. “I am a victim of Sir Cameron!”
Domitia broke her spell with a word, and the man tumbled to the floorboards between them.
“How so?” the witch asked calmly as the man scrambled to his hands and knees. She took one of the knight’s abandoned chairs, lowering herself with a regality that Glenda had to admire.
